A police checkpoint in Frankfurt's train station district.
Image: Lucas Bäuml
Anyone who denies the connection between immigration and foreign crime is acting against their better judgment. The crime statistics speak for themselves.
MThe fire brigade and police describe the operational goal of containing an existing danger in the first step in order to avert it as completely as possible in the second step using the formula “Getting ahead of the situation”. In politics it is often about first getting to grips with the situation through communication.
The North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Herbert Reul (CDU) recently demonstrated how this can be achieved. Three weeks before Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) published the police crime statistics for 2023, Reul rushed forward with the central, sobering findings from the most populous federal state: The number of foreign suspects – which, measured against the non-German population share, has already been in the statistics for a long time have been overrepresented for years – has increased significantly again. In the case of pickpocketing, four out of five suspects do not have a German passport, and around half in the case of house burglaries, shoplifting and robbery crimes. In 40 percent of cases of dangerous and serious bodily harm, the suspected perpetrators are foreigners.